Self-portrait with the IPA chart

Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, Nigeria

After Nnadi Samuel

How do I believe this grief is not a descendant
of a nasal sound, how it lowers my velum, blocks my air
from passing through the oral cavity— makes a velic opening,
& then it drags me through the mucus of the nose.

I’m a testament of every assimilated vowel,
do not say this is a hiatus resolution,
do not say I’m wearing another man’s identity
during the discourse,

today, I’m voiceless for gloom, & tomorrow
I will be voiced— which means my vocal cord of euphoria
vibrates at the sight of melancholy.

Grief is a language or perhaps a dialect of the Yoruba
I speak everyday— perhaps I learnt this language dialect
through my father’s dead body,
perhaps if he didn’t become another lost flower
I, too, wouldn’t become a freebie for grief.

I walk through a dirty road trying to cradle morphemes
for the way I feel, I say cracked screen, I say broken carapace,
all my verbs motion explosion— outburst? Detonate?

Every time I write a poem, my father sneaks in like the air
of a fricative consonant, which means there is nothing to obstruct
his phasing into my thoughts, ever wondered why the word silence
begins with a sibilant sound? See, it lacks obstruction & everything traps it
between their fingers & it continues to maintain its silence.

War, glory and grief

Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, Nigeria

The glottis of this night vibrates, & what I mean is this:
this night is not voiceless, the birds in its throat sings of bullets.

Down the street, a stampede rages at the hearing of recurring
gunshots, because nobody wants to sleep with an epitaph at the edge

of their beds, nobody wants to be the memories curled from
ashes. A war, too, ends with roses, bonded roses, a wreath

of roses or a rose bud. Grieving flowers— dressing the
gravestone through hands with war sitting under their

fingernails, there eye brows & somewhere inside there
bodies, & they continue to live with the cicatrix— a scar is a

visible thing, but a survivor of fire carries the unseen scars, that is—
it unearths the nightmares & their loved ones that never had a proper

burial, & see, if there should be privacy in heaven,
how would they cope? Don’t convince me about the glory of war,

when a war touches a pristine country, it defiles it how a bad
uncle does to his young flowers. & staring at the abattoir draws

a Mississippi of blood into the throat of a war survivor
& he carries all these dead as the silence that echoes in his throat.


*With a line borrowed from the title of a poem by Michael Akuchie

Abdulkareem Abdulkareem (Pānini) (he/him), Frontier III, is a Nigerian writer, he studies Linguistics at the University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria. His poem was shortlisted for the top 20 poems of the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize (NSPP) 2021 & the top entries of the Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest (August/September) 2021. His works appear/forthcoming on Poetry Column-NND, Shallow Tales Review, Brittle Paper, Ice Floe, Feral, Rigorous, Second Chance lit, Olney magazine, Window Facing Window Review, Celestite Poetry, Sledgehammer lit, Salamander ink, Afro literary magazine, Lunaris Review, Kissing Dynamite, Afrocritik & elsewhere. He is a member of The Frontiers Collective. He tweets @panini500bc. Instagram panini_500bc